4.01.2009

THEME: APRIL / FOOL'S / DAY — three theme answers are film titles, the last words of which are APRIL, FOOL'S, and DAY, respectively

Look what I got for April Fool's Day — three movies I've never seen and don't know anything about! I've at least heard of "PIECES OF APRIL" and "THE LONGEST DAY." "SHIP OF FOOLS," on the other hand, is a painting or a World Party song to me. A Katherine Anne Porter novel? If you say so. Today's theme is simple, straightforward, coherent, and not at all tricky. Right over the plate. So much so that, despite not knowing Any of the theme answers, I solved this — on paper — in the low 4 minute range, which is supa dupa fast for me. My only hangups were at ASTRUD (42A: "The Girl From Ipanema" singer Gilberto) — I thought her name was ASTR*I*D — and TOWER (52D: Quasimodo's hangout) — I knew that he hung out in a big famous French building, and I knew it wasn't the LOUVRE but couldn't get that museum's name out of my head. Then I remembered it was NOTRE DAME, but that didn't fit either. Let's see ... there are bells there, I think ... ah, TOWER. Very good.

Theme answers:

20A: 2003 Katie Holmes film ("Pieces of APRIL")

37A: 1965 film based on a Katherine Anne Porter novel ("Ship of FOOLS")

55A: 1962 WWII film ("The Longest DAY")

If you followed the comments thread a couple days back, you know there was a longish, statistic-oriented discussion about why the same words seem to occur in different puzzles published on the same day so often. Well, I can tell you that that is happening a lot today, as you will notice if you do all the puzzles available to you today — see Ephraim's puzzle pointers every day for links to all available puzzles, and be sure not to miss Brendan Emmett Quigley's original puzzles, published every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at his website. You especially should not miss today's — which will probably post at 10am EDT. It's got some words in common with this grid. At least two. One of them reasonably uncommon. Weird.

Crosswordese 101: again, lots to choose from, but I'm going to kill two birds with one stone and go after playwrights today, specifically William INGE (24A: "Bus Stop" playwright) and Clifford ODETS (39D: "Golden Boy" dramatist). These guys are everywhere, especially INGE, who is one of the most common proper nouns in all of grid-dom. I know ODETS only because I was once thumbing through postcards at some artsy shop in Ann Arbor and I came across what I thought was a photo of my college French professor — but no, it was some guy I'd never heard of named Clifford ODETS. ODETS gets clued most often via "Waiting for Lefty" while INGE usually gets the "Picnic" or "Bus Stop" treatment. Wikipedia tells me that ODETS was married to Academy-Award winning actress Luise Rainer at one point, had a relationship with Frances Farmer, and got hauled before HUAC, where he disavowed his Communist affiliations and named names, thus keeping him from getting blacklisted.

What else?

16A: "Flip This House" airer (A AND E) — parsing! if a word doesn't look like a word, it might not be just one word. You must beware the ampersandwiches. A AND E, A AND W, R AND B, etc.

17A: Some dadaist art (Arps) — ARP could easily have been the Crosswordese 101 entry of the day. Usually not seen in the plural!

Ditto on ASTRID vs. ASTRUD. The PGA TOIR sounded French but very, very wrong.

PIECES OF APRIL was a fairly well-received indie movie about a young woman estranged from her family. Her boyfriend is played by Derek Luke, who was so good in Antwone Fisher. Despite the "April" in the title, the movie takes place at Thanksgiving, and April (Holmes' character) invites her family over for dinner. Patricia Clarkson plays her mom, and Clarkson is one of the queens of indie film.

Like Sandy, I was looking for "of" in the third long answer, but eventually saw the theme (although, at that point, I already had DAY through the crosses, so figuring out the theme didn't do me any good).

Nice to see the one-l lama.

Finally coming to realize that part of my struggle in doing these things is that I'm not a very good speller. I'm ok when writing across, but when filling out the down answers, I get tripped up on words like APPAREL and ANALYSIS. Who knew?

Oh, and I've been meaning to send a big THANK YOU to the LAT for bring lefty-friendly. When I print the puzzle, the grid is in the lower left hand corner and I can see the clues without moving my hand. This is very helpful as I'm getting up to speed.

OK, for some reason, that has allowed me to feel vaguely superior for a few short minutes today.

I had to look up SOF and just learned that it was the #1 best-selling novel in 1962. Would never have guessed. I recall it being sort of heavy on symbolism, but in an interesting way - lots of good satirical human nature stuff. I don't think it would fall into the best seller category today.